¯\_(ツ)_/¯ retweetledi
A frog the size of your fingernail lives at this waterfall, inside a single species of plant. It is born in one, mates in one, raises its tadpoles in one, and dies in one. The whole species is found in this small corner of Guyana and nowhere else on Earth.
The plant is a giant bromeliad. It belongs to the same family as the pineapple, with long stiff leaves that spiral out from the center and trap rainwater between them in small pools. Those pools are the frog's entire world. Males defend one plant as their home territory. They carry tadpoles on their backs from pool to pool. The females lay extra eggs that never hatch, so the tadpoles have something to eat. The entire species lives in a patch of forest under 8 square miles.
The waterfall makes all of this possible. Water drops 741 feet in a single fall, more than four times the height of Niagara. Every four seconds, enough water goes over the edge to fill an Olympic swimming pool. No other single-drop waterfall on Earth carries that much water.
When the water hits the bottom of the cliff, the impact throws up a permanent cloud of mist. The wind pushes the mist back up over the cliff edge. Up top, the mist soaks the rocks and the trees, building a narrow strip of cool, wet, foggy forest in the middle of a hot, lowland jungle. Nothing else for hundreds of miles has this same environment.
Almost half of the plant species that grow only in this part of northern South America are found inside this one national park. Swifts (small, fast birds) nest in a hidden rock shelf right behind the curtain of falling water. The falls have been a wall to fish for so long that the fish living above the cliff are trapped up there. With nowhere to go, they evolved into species that exist nowhere else. Researchers sampled 28 fish species above the falls. 4 of them live only there, and 6 more may not yet have a name.
Kaieteur sits on a giant slab of ancient rock called the Guiana Shield. It is about 1.7 billion years old, and it is completely separate from the Amazon basin. The river feeding the waterfall (the Potaro) flows east into another river called the Essequibo, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean without ever touching the Amazon. That separation, plus the Shield's age, is the whole reason this frog and these fish and this little patch of cloud forest could evolve here in the first place.
A British surveyor named Charles Barrington Brown was the first European to lay eyes on the falls in 1870. The local Patamona people had known about them for centuries. Take the waterfall away, and most of what lives within a mile of it, the frog included, would have nowhere left on Earth to go.
Massimo@Rainmaker1973
Deep in the Amazon forest, is the world's largest single drop waterfall, Guyana
English
